The downward spiral continues-Neumann gets a rider

Since we took possession of this hundred-year-old pile of bricks twenty years ago, I have prided myself on using nothing but an old-school push mower to trim the expansive lawns. Everybody I know has, for twenty years, told me I’m an idiot. I tell them right back I get 3x the recommended exercise for a man my age just by pushing that sucker back and forth across the grass… no $200 a month gym membership for me! Nosiree! An old-school push mower is just the ticket if you want to live forever! Or so I thought. Needless to say, my recent CHF diagnosis has kyboshed that theory. I’m trying to contain my outrage and disappointment because that shit can just ruin one day after another… better to breathe deep and just keep pushing…oh, I forgot… I’m breathless after thirty seconds of breathing deep. As the kids used to say, that fuckin’ sucks. But every cloud has its silver, or in this case, “Cub Cadet Yellow,” lining. As I’ve been reminded many times, that cup-holder they put on every lawn tractor of every brand has the potential to transform a drudgey chore into an excellent adventure! What the hell… if I can’t work lawncare into my physical fitness routine, at least it can be part of my entertainment regimen. NEWS FLASH: Retired teacher busted for drunk lawn mowing. The downward spiral never ends…

The gentrification of Ontario's cattle country

For as long as I can remember, northern Grey County and all of Bruce County were considered "cattle country." The official mascot of Bruce County was "Big Bruce," a beef cattle-beast, whose twelve-foot-tall likeness still welcomes you at the northern approach to the town of Chesley.

A hundred acre spread up the road just came on the market at $1.5 million. A hundred acres let's you graze a dozen cow-calf pairs over the summer, plus grow the hay to overwinter them. In a good year, those twelve calves will fetch $12k at sale. Out of that you pay for your inputs. Hayfields need to be rejuvenated, equipment must be maintained and replaced, and veterinarians will occasionally be called upon. Your hundred acre beef farm might reliably return five or six thousand dollars in the course of a year.

Do the math, and you quickly realize that farm up the road won't be bought by a beef farmer. 

Instead, it'll either go to an absentee investor who will separately rent out the house and the pastures, or an affluent urbanite looking for a weekend retreat and a retirement option.

To the untrained eye, the landscape will remain the same. There'll be cows grazing in the fields, because neither the investors nor the affluent urbanites care for farming, and are happy enough to rent their pastures back to authentic farmers.

And that's an endangered species, the authentic beef farmer. The only young farmers getting into beef around here are kids who are inheriting the family farm and are debt-free. Not all farmer's children want to live the farm life, and as time goes on, more and more farms end up owned by non-farmers.

That's just common sense, given current market conditions. The guys who graze their cattle on my farm are a father-son team who own a couple farms of their own, inherited mortgage free, rent a few more, and have a herd of 150 cows. My guess is if you divided their total net annual income by the hours they put in, they'd be shy of making minimum wage.

On the other hand, they could cash out, pocket at least three millions for throwing in the towel, and the next generation of their family can live the good life in an exciting city somewhere. 

As much as they love what they do, you know what's going to happen eventually. 

On the plus side, the Audis, Porsches, and Land Rovers give you a nice break from watching nothing but pickups and John Deeres going by.

They don't make lawnmowers like they used to

I've got nothing but good things to say about my current piece-of-shit made-in-China lawnmower. I picked it up at Home Hardware a few years ago for $199 plus tax. That replaced my previous piece-of-shit lawnmower, also made in China...

But, no more than five years into its tenure, and while the motor started first pull after the winter hibernation, today one of the wheels fell off. Well, not fell off completely, but I guess metal fatigue led to the collapse of the gusset that stabilises the wheel assembly. I was able to bend it back into its original position and continue my mission, but you can only do that so many times before the thing breaks off completely. 

So I mention to the Farm Manager that I may have to get a new mower. She says, maybe it's time to consider a ride-on.

Ya, maybe she's right. Maybe it's time. In my mind, I figure I'm saving the cost of a gym membership by pushing the fucking lawnmower around for three hours a week. 

But maybe I'm being an idiot. Maybe I should get with the modern times. Smell the coffee, as it were.

After doing some research, I found the perfect ride-on mower. As a bonus, it has a back-hoe at one end and a bucket at the other, and all that for a mere $50k! And it's not even made in China!

The FM comes back with "they've got a nice John Deere ride-on at Home Depot for nineteen hundred bucks and it's got a beer-can holder."

So does the Kubota!

John Deere rebellion

One of the local old-timers pulled his 1967 John Deere into the driveway today, and shut it down. That's the signal he's got time to socialize. He's got at least half a dozen Deere tractors, so naturally, that's what we end up chatting about.

While we're chatting, we're continuously interrupted by gravel trucks heading home. The local gravel baron recently sold out to a big-city outfit for a sum rumoured to be well into the hundreds of millions.

Buddy makes the observation that, under the old owner, those trucks wouldn't have been heading home till seven or eight in the evening, whereas we're witnessing a steady parade of hopper trucks heading to the yard, at a very leisurely pace, well before five o'clock.

Rumour has it that in the near future the price of gravel will double and those hopper trucks will be taking gravel Brampton way, but that's just hearsay.

Buddy mentions that he's got a mid '70's Deere that he's had for decades, and it's worth more today than it was when he bought it. That's kind of unusual. There's not much stuff you bought in the seventies that's worth more today. The right kind of art, maybe, and real estate of course, but... farm tractors?

Seems that on the new tractors everything is computer dependant, and the computer codes, the software that's the operating system, are proprietary intellectual property. When your late model John Deere breaks down out in the field, you don't fix 'n go.

Nope, you call JD HQ in Moline Illinois.

That seems to work ok for the big-time cash croppers and the corporate farms, but it doesn't work for your family farmers, the people to whom it matters if you can get another year out of the old rig before you commit a quarter million bucks to a new one.

These are the people bidding up the price of the old John Deeres, and avoiding the new ones.

Illusions, confusions, delusions, and hallucinations

(note downward spiral implied in title)

It's been a seriously strange couple of weeks here at Falling Downs.

The Farm Manager finds it "unfathomable" that her 89 year old mother has passed.

Just a week ago we were finding it unfathomable that she was still with us.

But there you go. What is fathomable and what is unfathomable depends not on what's actually going on. It depends on perspective.

For my part, travels to and from the Ivey Eye Institute have been facilitated by my dear sister and my 87 year old father. These trips take us through the heart of Letterkenny country. Dad and I stopped off at Timmies in Listowel last night. The place was crawling with uptight young farmers, the kind of guys who drive $90,000 pickup trucks but fret about the price of corn.

And who can blame them for fretting?

Apparently you're no longer allowed to have your own mechanic fix your John Deere tractor anymore. That's the proprietary preserve of Deere's corporate technicians. No wonder those young farmers are fretting. Some of them own two, three, or more half million dollar tractors and they can't keep them running without the blessing of Deere HQ in Moline.

One of the big motivators that keeps young guys in farming, and bear in mind that 100% of the young guys in farming inherited their farms, is the illusion of independence. How independent can you be when the price of your crop is determined by foreign markets and your tractor repairs have to be done by head office?

Nevertheless, a hundred acres of raw land with no buildings, down in Letterkenny country, will set you back over a million bucks. A hundred acres doesn't make a serious farm in this day and age. Folks just plunk down that million to "add to their holdings."

And of course, none of those guys have a million bucks sitting around. All that expansion and consolidation is financed by bank lending. As soon as the banks get nervous, the entire house-o-cards is gonna collapse.

Good luck to those stoic young farmers when that happens. Timmies can only hire so many.

Sometimes we move from confused and deluded right into the realm of hallucination. That's when you're able to convince yourself that all is going according to plan, when, in fact, it's all going to shit.

It's the existential variant of "I meant to do that."

Of course you did!

I'd been planning that detached retina for months. I'm surprised nobody has caught on.

John Deere and his many victims

I was sitting out on the stoop here at Falling Downs, enjoying the birds at the various feeders, when a half-million$ John Deere tractor drove by. It was towing a very impressive John Deere seeding rig that would have easily been worth another quarter million.

What that tells you is that Buddy in the air-conditioned cab of that John Deere is really really hoping there's a good market for canola and soybeans this year, because that's the only way he's going to make the payments on his hardware.

That's gotta be a tough pickle to be in. It wasn't the canola farmers who thought it would be clever to arrest that Huawei CFO.

No, that was really smart folks in Ottawa, who universally agree that "diversity is our strength."

Mr. Farmer doesn't really give a shit about diversity. He totally does not care about Justin and Chrystia's latest photo-op.


He cares about making his John Deere payments.

Junior's impeccable lawnmower logic

Had a lunch date with Junior last week, when I was down in the City attending to some medical issues. Yup, the old "temple" is collapsing in on itself faster than this pile of red bricks we call "Falling Downs."

Anyway, I was explaining the lawnmower woes to him, and I must say he provided some refreshing insights. As the regular reader will know, I have a long-standing aversion to riding mowers. One reason I have defied Dr. E.J. Crispin's dire prediction of forty years ago (to wit; you'll be dead soon) is because I'm pretty religious about getting regular exercise.

For sure! I'll walk five miles to meet my drug dealer instead of taking the car, if you know what I mean. It's that namby-pamby soft life-style that kills off the aging addicts, not the actual addiction. So I've always seen the push mower as an integral part of the exercise regimen, at least till this week.

So after hearing my compelling yarn about how and why my dandelions came to be three feet high, he says "Dad, you gotta get over yourself; get a fucking riding mower already."

Truth be told, I'd already been guiltily eyeballing the riding mowers. Home Depot has a sweet little John Deere number on offer for two grand. My inner Calvanist immediately says "OK asshole, spend two grand to avoid exercise; you'll die soon and you're going to hell."

I generally give my inner Calvanist short shrift, but this observation has been haunting me. Therefore Junior's logic struck me as quite liberating. He says, "Dad, if you get a ride-on, you can think of it as sitting down and having a beer."

Hmm... he's right! The lawn will be done in half the time, and it won't be time spent pushing around a walk-behind in the hot sun, and that wee Deere does in fact have a cup holder; I'll just be sitting down having a beer!... while steering a little John Deere!

Thanks pal!

Lawnmower fear and loathing at Sears

So me and the Farm Manager have been on the lawn-mower hunt of late. Yup, the unit I bought at Sears not more than three or four years ago has done gone for a shit.

Craftsman. Used to be a good name. Something that would last, if not a lifetime, at least a long while.

Three or four years?... get outta here!

So we do the circle tour; Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Home Depot... there's a reasonably good deal on John Deere riding mowers at Home Depot.

I'm a little ambivalent about the riding mowers. In my world, or at least the place I've thought of as my world, a riding mower signifies that you're a fat old guy who is afraid of actually pushing a push mower around the yard because it's an all-too-obvious invitation for a heart attack.

This is of course a self-defeating proposition. You think you're a fat old guy at risk of a heart attack, so you avoid exercise? Hello!

So I've always taken a certain amount of pride in being the fat old guy who pushes the push mower around his half acre of lawn. God damn it, I'd rather die getting the exercise than avoiding it!

I've got some reservations about even stopping off at Sears, because even if that three or four years was actually five or six, it's not nearly enough, but we stopped in anyways. They had a sale on the push mowers, and by God if that didn't rekindle my determination to push a push-mower for as long as I can before I decamp to the ride-on camp.

I was ready to forgive and forget the piece of shit they sold me last time round.

First thing the Farm Manager says when we meet the salesperson is "we've had a lawnmower breakdown and the dandelions are a foot high."

So we scope out the selection on sale and, after a good half hour consultation with the sales team, settle on the model that's $100 off, has the big back wheels, and the premium Briggs and Stratton motor with 7.5 foot-pounds of torque.

Oh, we sold the last one yesterday...

No problem, I'll take the floor model.

Oh, we can't sell you the floor model; somebody could come along and want to see its features.

So when can you get me the mower you just sold me?

The sales team has a huddle and figure there might be a shipment on the truck that's coming in next Thursday, but they're gonna check on the computer just to make sure.

They disappear for fifteen minutes, and come back with the news that it'll take a week to ten days to get me the lawnmower they just sold me.

Huh?

Sorry, but by then the dandelions in the yard will be two feet high...

You can't sell me the floor model because somebody might want to see it... and what do you think will happen when you explain to them that they'll have to wait a week to ten days to get one?

They'll most likely do what I did; get their lawnmower somewhere else.